My Journey Toward and Within Psychoanalytic Anthropology

Am I a psychoanalytic anthropologist? Over the course of my 45-year career, I have accrued many disciplinary labels to categorize my work. In the early-to-mid 1970’s, Weston La Barre, Melford Spiro, L. Bryce Boyer, and George DeVos—all mentors—told me that I was a psychoanalytic anthropologist. Around the same time, Lloyd deMause and Henry Ebel contacted me to present a paper at the 1978 inaugural meeting of the International Psycho-historical Association (IPA) and said that I was clearly also a psychohistorian. Through my work since around 1980 with the High Plains Society for Applied Anthropology, I have been called, and call myself, an applied anthropologist. Around 1990, Michael Diamond, a leader in the field of organizational psychodynamics, invited me to join the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations. I have been claimed by medical anthropology for my work in ethnicity and health, family medicine, and American biomedicine.

My work spans and attempts to integrate many disciplines. Ultimately, if I must label myself, I would say that I am simply an anthropologist for whom the unconscious dimension has always been essential to understanding culture, and for whom “psychoanalytic” deepens and completes the “anthropology.” For me, “psychoanalytic anthropology” is an approach to doing both theoretical and applied anthropology. I do not experience it as a distinct field. Ironically, much of my publication has been in literatures and disciplines outside academic anthropology. My version of psychoanalytic anthropology has been welcomed more in disci-

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plines outside academic anthropology than in it. Ever since I took a course in culture and personality, taught by Otto von Mering in the late-1960’s, I have included the unconscious dimension in all my work. Dr. von Mering introduced me to the writing of Erik Erikson, whose work I devoured and whom in the early 1980’s I had the pleasure of meeting. I had a Maurice Falk Medical Fund fellowship during my graduate school years in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh and Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic (WPIC). I was blessed to be taken under the wing of Jeremiah O’Mara, the WPIC chief librarian, who introduced me to Freud, Abraham, Ferenczi, Hartmann, Winnicott, and many other classical and object relational psychoanalytic writers. Later, George DeVos and L. Bryce Boyer helped guide my reading and thinking at long distance—California to Tennessee, and later to Oklahoma.

In my first full-time postgraduate job, in psychiatry at Meharry Medical College (1972-1978), in Nashville, Tennessee, the chair, the child psychiatrist/psychoanalyst Jeanne Spurlock, recognized my fledgling interest in the unconscious and let me to join her psychiatry residents as a full-fledged participant in her seminars in classical psychiatric/psychoanalytic literature. I remember taking Freud’s case study of the “Wolf Man,” reading everything I could get my hands on about the Wolf Man by Freud and others, and making a formal presentation in the seminar. That work led to a paper linking the Wolf Man to Russian-Soviet history and culture; it was later published in The Psychoanalytic Study of Society.

My doctoral dissertation work from 1968 to early 1972 was a study of multi-generation Slovak and Rusyn (a Slavic speaking group east of the Slovaks in the Carpathian Mountains) American identity (in Erik Erikson’s sense of the term), in what was then the “Steel Valley” of Western Pennsylvania. The era coincided with the rise of the White Ethnic Movement, about which my fellow graduate student and colleague Robert F. Hill and I wrote a book called The Ethnic Imperative (1977). Early in the manuscript, we wrote that we had been highly influenced by the writing of Weston La Barre. To our great fortune, Dr. La Barre was the reader the press chose to review the manuscript. This led to my long friendship with him that lasted from the late 1970s to his death in 1996.

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He was one of the most influential thinkers as well as a kind of surrogate father in my life.

The reader might expect my family of origin to have exerted a power on my interest in the unconscious and its cultural manifestations. Born in 1946, I grew up in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, a factory town near Pittsburgh. My mother was often profoundly, suicidally depressed and emotionally unavailable. Even when I was a child, she often would tell me her problems; from her, I learned to be an attentive listener and to try to help even when it felt overwhelming. My father, the stabilizing person in our apartment, was alternately thoughtful, kind, encouraging, enraged, and brutal. From him, a violinist before he became a small-town merchant, I received my love of classical music, and learned to read the entire score—precursor to anthropological holism!

My maternal grandfather, who owned the apartment building and lived in the apartment across the hall from us, detested my father both as a person and because he was a Rumanian Jew (the lowest rung on the status hierarchy of Jews). My grandfather, who was always tender toward me, was an immigrant Lithuanian Jew (via the Russian-partitioned part of Poland) who was a descendant of generations of learned rabbis and scholars (the top rung of the Jewish status hierarchy). Long ago, a wise therapist told me that my grandfather emotionally saved my life. At the same time, I was chronically “in the middle” in all of my family relationships, a role that later deeply informed my applied anthropology, including organizational consulting, where I became able to listen to and contain all sides of a conflict.

After a rebellion and split in a local orthodox synagogue by a large group of younger Jewish members who wished to be more modern and reform, my family became the only conservative Jewish family in town. One of the younger group actually spit on my father during one of his daily walks. So even among Jews in my home town, I was the marginalized Other. To make matters worse, when I attended Hebrew school in the Jewish district of Pittsburgh, I was spurned as the “small town kid” who did not attend the others’ high status schools. I did not belong there either.

The chronic psychological “warfare” between virtually eve-

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ryone in my family, and my perpetual experience of outsiderness, set the stage for my lifelong interest in projection and projectiveidentification as the “glue” in the relationship between enemies over history and in current international relations where an us/them polarity prevailed (US/USSR, Slovaks/Hungarians, Jews/ Christians, Jews/Palestinians). In part, I came to “specialize” in my family, cultural, and community conflicts (including my own) writ large in organizational, ethnic, national, and international life.

In 1980, I came to serve as Ittleson Consultant to the Committee on International Relations, of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, to study ethnic conflict and nationalism; I collaborated with them on a book titled Us and Them: The Psychology of Ethno-Nationalism (1987). I met with them twice a year for six years. Here I met Vamık Volkan, who became one of my closest colleagues and dearest friends. Around the same time, I twice participated in Erik Erikson seminars at Esalen on the psychology of U.S.-Soviet relations. In the mid-1980s, I twice spoke on the notion of psychogeography to executives of Shell International Maatschappij at Mt. Pèlerin, Switzerland. These talks led to several essays and two books on psychogeography, one of which was issued in 2013 in a second edition by the Library of Social Science.

In 1980 occurred another life-changing event: Lloyd deMause, founder, editor, and publisher of The Journal of Psychohistory, named me as editor of The Journal of Psychological Anthropology, which I renamed The Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology. I remained editor until 1988, when the journal was absorbed into The Journal of Psychohistory. For those eight years, I was able to advocate for the voices of some of the freshest thinkers in the psychodynamic study of culture.

As I look back on my career, I realize that most of my research has been the result of some applied project in the sense of problem-solving, such as teaching behavioral science to family medicine residents, consulting in American academic and rural healthcare settings, or teaching cultural medicine in rural Oklahoma. For example, I did not obtain a formal grant to “study” Oklahoma wheat and cattle farming culture, or the psychodynamics of the doctor-patient relationship. Rather, I found myself learning from, observing, teaching, and visiting with rural folk, physicians,

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and patients, and writing about my experiences in clinical and rural settings, and about the culture of Oklahoma.

Taking a cue from La Barre and Devereux, I have had a longstanding interest in the role of the conscious and unconscious personhood of the observer, researcher, and scholar, and of unconscious intersubjectivity, in all facets of anthropological work. Most recently, as organizational consultant and clinical teacher, I have come to compose and use my own poetry as tools of insight, imagination, collaboration, and intervention.

Although I formally retired in mid-2012 after teaching for nearly 35 years at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, I remain professionally and intellectually active, contributing to the medical humanities, applied anthropology, and psycho history, practicing psychoanalytic anthropology in these contexts.

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